Year: 2005

On speeding

The other day I was listening to the discussion on radio about lots of people speeding in UK and police trying to have matter under control. Many drivers were questioned and their answers provided for some interesting feedback. I don’t remember the number exactly now, but roughly more than a half of them said that they were speeding repeatedly in the past and that they will drive faster than laws allow in the future. When asked about the methods to stop them, the answers were pointing at drastic measures, such as extremely high fines, prisons, and license nullification.

This discussion reminded me of my own thoughts on the subject that I had about six month ago, but never wrote down. Needless to say that a new storm of ideas happened in my head. I am taking this chance now to write it all down and get it out of my system.

Continue reading On speeding

Lemons

Artistic lemonI felt the need to photograph something, but was too lazy to find a subject. So I was waiting for the “Photo Friday” challange. Today’s idea is “Luscious“, but I don’t really get it even after using the dictionary. English is not my native tongue, so I feel excused.

Absense of the thoughts got me really pissed off, so I just grabbed the first thing that I could and shot it. Luckily it was a lemon and I shot it with a camera, not a real gun. :)

Two resulting images are here.

Converting FLAC to MP3 on Linux

FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec. A 35 megabyte WAV file converted to FLAC will occupy about 25 megabytes. This is a good decrease in size, considering the fact that no quality is lost. But some files aren’t all about quality and thus will be much better in mp3 or even ogg. Converting these is really simple. The key to the convertion is to decode flac files back to wav and than to convert them to whatever else is that you want.

Here is an example script to convert a bunch of flac files in the directory to mp3s.

for FILE in *.flac
do
 echo Converting $FILE
 # Decode FLAC back to WAV
 /usr/bin/flac -d "$FILE"
 # Save the filename without extension
 BASE=`basename "$FILE" .flac`
 # Convert resulting WAV to MP3 with variable bitrate preserving good quality
 /usr/bin/lame -h -V 2 "$BASE".wav "$BASE".mp3
done

/usr/bin/flac utility is a part of Fedora Linux distribution. /usr/bin/lame is a part of LAME project. RPMs for Fedora Linux are available from a number of repositories, such as FreshRPMs.

A whole bunch of Gmail invites

I have my own server for everything I need, mail included. So all the Gmail fuzz is passing me by. But for the sake of those who are constantly in search for the invites, I’ll post the link to this site. It is basically a place for those who have invites to share them, and for those who are looking for invites to find them. Currently, they have more than 1,500,000 invites available. Add yours or grab one if you need.